How Important is the Diversity of Our Appellate Courts in Defining Justice? with Juvaria Khan

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

SideBar is brought to you by Monterey College of Law, San Luis Obispo College of Law, Kern County College of Law, empire College of Law, located in Santa Rosa and the colleges of law with campuses in Santa Barbara and Ventura.

Mitch Winick:

Welcome to SideBar discussions with local, state and national experts about protecting our most critical individual and civil rights Co-hosts Law Deans Jackie Gardina and Mitch Winick.

Renee Jefferson:

What does it mean when journalists are increasingly the ones who are enforcing the ethics of, in this case, the Supreme Court, but also lawyers because the profession and the judiciary has not sufficiently policed itself on ethics issues?

Mitch Winick:

That’s our guest, Renee Jefferson, an internationally recognized expert on legal and judicial ethics.

Jackie Gardina:

Mitch. We have had the opportunity to touch on how technology can actually improve equity. We haven’t touched on how technology can make the legal system more equitable, though people often joke that there are too many lawyers, but in reality, there aren’t enough legal services. Millions of low and middle income Americans go without legal services when needed and many don’t even know that there’s a legal solution to the problem they’re facing. The access to legal services in the US is a very real problem. Today we are speaking to someone who has dedicated her career to making law more equitable and accessible.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie Professor Renee Knake Jefferson holds the Dougherty chair and legal ethics at the University of Houston Law Center. And for the record, I’m a proud alumnus of the University of Houston Law Center. Furthermore, professor Jefferson and I share a professional and academic interest in legal ethics and professional responsibility having both written and taught on the subject. However, let’s be clear, only one of us is an internationally recognized expert on legal and judicial ethics, and that would be our guest today, Renee Jefferson, an award-winning scholar. She’s the author of five books and more than 30 academic articles. Her most recent book law democratized a Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis was just released January 9th. Professor Jefferson’s work is frequently cited in the Associated Press, Bloomberg Law, CNN, New York Times, Newsweek political Slate, and the Wall Street Journal. She also regularly appears on radio and television news shows including M-S-N-B-C and National Public Radio. If all of this is not amazing and exhausting enough, professor Jefferson publishes the legal ethics roundup each week. The digital newsletter is viewed by more than 1000 readers across the United States and in 20 different countries. It is not surprising that she was recently recognized by the American Association of Law schools with the Deborah l Roddy Award as a trailblazer in legal education and the legal profession. Renee, thank you for making time for us in your busy schedule and welcome to SideBar.

Renee Jefferson:

Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s a lot of fun to join both of you

Jackie Gardina:

And Renee. I was able to pre-order your book and get it exactly on January 9th and just want to give you a shout out for amazing systemic overview of the access to justice issue in the United States and how we can solve it. In reading your book, law democratized you really start by defining the problem around unmet legal needs. But before we dive into the specifics, I wanted to touch on something you said in your introduction because I think it reveals a much broader implications of the issue you state. The bedrock to American democracy rests upon access to meaningful justice. Meaningful justice requires the ability to obtain legal help regardless of one’s situation. We’ve spent a lot of time on many of our episodes talking about how the law and democracy are intertwined. Can you explain how you link democracy and access to legal services?

Renee Jefferson:

You’ve really touched on the heart of why I wrote this book and it’s been a decade plus long project. The research that I have called and gone through and reviewing it, and one thing that links time and time again, the work that I do in studying how lawyers and judges are regulated to me is how central it is to the heart of our democratic government. And even if you never find yourself in a situation where you think you might need a lawyer, even if you never have to go to court, I hope none of your listeners ever do, even though you have a law professor training the next generation of lawyers, we all hope that no one actually needs one. But when you do, you want a good one there. And even if you never need one, you want to know that you have access to a fair legal system where you will get the representation you need.

Sometimes that might require a lawyer, sometimes it might not, but at the end of the day, having access doesn’t just to me mean if you need it, you might be able to find the help. It’s knowing that it is there, whatever your circumstances. And so that’s what I’m thinking about when I’m contemplating the idea of meaningful access to legal help and that tying directly to our democracy. And I think one of the most obvious places we saw that on display was the challenges to the most recent presidential election and where the results of the election held it was in our courts. And so that’s a very concrete example where it’s very obvious that access to law equals democracy, but my book explores a lot of ways where it matters in everyday life

Mitch Winick:

Too. Renee Jackie and I have been active here in California on the topic of limited licensed legal practitioners, and when you talk about and use the term access to justice, I have a suspicion that you may agree with us, but I don’t want to just make that assumption. We believe that there’s a broader opportunity and access to justice beyond just limiting it to licensed lawyers in California. We’re calling those limited licensed legal practitioners, but frankly, it has not been an initiative that has been that popular or has much traction at the moment. What do you think about expanding the definition of legal practice to have a different level of licensure or opening up to others who could assist people?

Renee Jefferson:

That’s one of the reforms I advocate in the book, and part of what I do is highlight efforts both in the United States, although as you note there has not been as much traction as I might’ve thought there would be a decade ago or 15 years ago when I first started working on these issues. But I also look at efforts around the globe too where individuals can get legal help, not necessarily from a lawyer, sometimes it can be through tools that they use on their own. That’s going to only be increasingly so as we see generative AI explode. And then there are also ways that we might think about different paths to licensure that don’t require three years in a JD in the same sort of traditional training of a lawyer, especially in areas where we have high needs that lawyers aren’t currently fulfilling. I’m really open to, and part of why I have a blueprint as my solution is because I don’t think that there’s a one size fits all. There’s not a magic key we’re going to turn to solve the access to justice problem in this country, but it’s going to require a lot of creative thinking and one of those paths is absolutely your point, which is thinking about alternative paths to how one might deliver legal services beyond just obtaining the JD after three years of law school.

Mitch Winick:

I was going to say as a follow-up, as I mentioned Jackie and I have both been pretty outspoken in favor of that idea in California, unlike in Texas, they bifurcated the state bar. We have an administrative group that is the regulatory part. They created the California Lawyers Association for the membership part, and unfortunately we were up against almost a brick wall. The California lawyers Association uniformly fights against any redefinition of licensure, expansion of licensure, redefinition of the unauthorized practice of law. So we’re not all that hopeful at the moment, but we are persistent

Renee Jefferson:

And I think persistence is key, right? I mean that certainly is a lesson that I have learned in my career. So it’s 2024 now. I served on the American Bar Association’s Commission for the Future of legal services in 20 15, 20 16. That was based on work that I had been doing at my former academic home Michigan state related to law and technology and innovation and entrepreneurship. At the time, I think Washington State was experimenting with limited licensed legal technicians and I remember thinking, wow, this is just going to explode across the country. And here we are a decade, almost two decades later in some instances, and we’ve seen a little bit of it, some states are experimenting in real and meaningful ways like Arizona and Utah. Perhaps as members of the profession become more comfortable and we’re able to really study and look at the outcomes there, we will actually see greater acceptance and adoption of these, I want to say more creative. I don’t know that it’s super creative at this point. The plans are out there, it’s putting them into action that needs to happen next,

Jackie Gardina:

And your book certainly provides, as you said, the blueprint for doing that. And one of the things I found really interesting about the book, and it probably goes to your role in teaching legal ethics, is really your connection and you write a dedicated a chapter in your book to the role of courts and legal ethics in preserving democracy. And then as we mentioned before, preserving democracy is essential to access to justice or true access to justice. But you note in the chapter, and you noted in earlier answer to the question that we have a bunch of lawyers who participated in undermining the 2020 election and even continued to lie to the public after the courts had determined that the election results were valid. You suggest that preserving democracy is necessary to solve the access to justice problem and it should be a priority, and in fact, the legal profession needs to think more seriously about holding attorneys accountable for their speech, not just in the Courtroom, but outside the Courtroom. Do you anticipate a First Amendment issue with regulating attorney speech?

Mitch Winick:

We are going to take a brief break and when we come back, professor Renee Jefferson is going to answer Jackie’s question about lawyer speech and the First Amendment.

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Jackie Gardina:

Visit Monterey law.edu.

Mitch Winick:

Welcome to the Future of Legal Intelligence Trellis, a state trial court research and analytics solution. Trellis offers state trial court records for legal research with analysis on judges opposing Counsel verdicts, motions, dockets, and legal issues. Visit our website Trellis Law.

Mitch Winick:

Welcome back. We’re talking with Professor Renee Jefferson about whether there are appropriate ways to limit lawyer speech without violating their first amendment rights.

Renee Jefferson:

The reality is lawyer speech is limited in lots of ways and in fact, in exchange for the privilege of practicing laws and attorney, there are lots of ways that lawyers cannot speak as if they were private citizens. You can’t reveal client confidences when you’re in a Courtroom. You have lots of rules that govern what is admissible and how you have to disclose falsehoods to the tribunal, to the court, to the judge. And so lawyers operate under lots of constraints already. In fact, speaking to the media in certain instances too under our legal ethics rules. And so my point is, first of all, I don’t want to stop anyone from saying what they want to say. As a private individual, say whatever you want, and that’s a bedrock of the First Amendment in this country and the way it functions and has been understood over time.

But when one has the privilege of a law license and practicing law, that does come with some sacrifice and that’s something that the profession has long understood and honored. It is central to our ethical code in how we conduct ourselves with our clients, with third parties and with the courts. So part of what I have done in that chapter is to reflect a bit on, well, if a lawyer can’t say something in the Courtroom because it’s not based on fact, should we be concerned when the lawyer can say it in the court of public opinion as a lawyer and what are the consequences? And especially when we see consequences as profound as we did in January 6th and involving our elections. I think we as a profession had to take a hard look at how we govern ourselves. We’re a largely self-regulated profession and what we expect of one another when a lawyer is speaking as a lawyer on behalf of a client.

Jackie Gardina:

We had Jeff Caif on here to talk about his book, liar in a Crowded Theater, and he’s a First Amendment absolution, so even lies are protected. That was his whole position and I tried to argue and so I was so happy when I read it in your book that we take seriously this idea that lawyers cannot undermine the administration of justice by lying in the Courtroom, but for some reason we don’t take it seriously if they’re undermining democracy, which as you, I think ably argue is directly connected to the administration of justice. So I was really pleased. It made me feel smart to see you actually writing an entire chapter. I’m like, yes, she articulated what I was trying to argue to Jeff Passive. Thank you for that. Well,

Renee Jefferson:

Part of why that chapter’s there is because as I was finishing the book, it occurred to me all the arguments that I make in the book for why need to make our legal system, which is one of the best in the world, except we rank horribly on access to it, right? Why we need to make it more accessible, but what’s the point of implementing all of my reforms to access if we don’t protect our court system and the government that it functions in? And so I felt like I had to say something about that, especially as I was bringing this manuscript to completion. I realized there’s a healthy debate there among legal ethicists, among lawyers, among First Amendment scholars where you draw that line, but for lawyers, we’ve already drawn the line and we aren’t able to speak as individual citizens when we are acting as lawyers. That’s my point. Someone feels strongly that they don’t want to be constrained in that way. You don’t have to be a lawyer, so there’s always that.

Mitch Winick:

Okay, so let’s talk about protection of the profession or the integrity the profession. And Jackie and I on a number of our episodes have been concerned about something that I am sure you knew we were going to get to, which is the code of ethics for the Supreme Court because in many ways it all starts at the top and if we’re concerned that there’s not integrity and ethics at the US Supreme Court, how do we have the downstream expectations of that level of integrity elsewhere, both in other courts but within the profession as a whole? What are your thoughts about the current code of ethics that was enacted by the court? Of course, Jackie and I have talked openly about our concern that there’s no enforceability element to it, and now as we see the current session of the court, there again is some concern whether certain of the justices really care about the conflict of interest issues that are in that code of ethics. Not to put you on the spot too squarely, but you are our expert in the room. What are your thoughts?

Renee Jefferson:

Well, I agree with you 100% on the enforceability issue and in fact, I really question what is the point at all? I often say outside of this context, but it’s true here as well. A law on the books is meaningless if you don’t have a mechanism to enforce it. I usually talk about that when I’m advocating for why we need access to lawyers or legal help knowledge about legal rights and entitlements for the public so that they can know what the law is and what it allows them to do. But it applies equally here. Having the ethics code on the books is ceremonial at best when there is no enforcement for, there’s no mechanism for enforcement and it’s perhaps not surprising that already, I mean, we’re in early days of the court actually using it and predictably, justice Kagan was the first decided it, and she was one who was last fall calling for and predicting that there would be an ethics code.

I’m concerned that the court should be doing more, and it goes to a couple of different aspects here. It matters first to the litigants who are actually having real issues that matter to them decided in front of the US Supreme Court. It matters because if a judge is biased or if a judge has some sort of reason why they won’t be deciding the case fairly, it goes to the legitimacy of the outcome of the case, but it also matters to the public and understanding and believing in the decisions that come out of the United States Supreme Court. So even if you aren’t going to be directly impacted by a judge who has some sort of bias, a financial tie or some other relationship that’s going to taint the outcome of the case, it goes to the public’s perception of the integrity of the Supreme Court and the whole judicial system because it’s so prominent.

The other thing I will say, it’s a bit of a trade off. If there’s, I don’t know, is silver lining the right way to put this, but if there’s an upshot to the court’s resistance to adopt a code of ethics, it’s been a real interest by the public in understanding who these justices are, how they’re deciding these cases, and do they have a stake in the outcome that hasn’t been disclosed, that’s driven both by the fact that we’ve seen some decisions come from the court that really matter to individuals lives, for example, with respect to removing women’s ability to choose their own reproductive health decisions, but it’s also driven by this very public resistance by the court to adopt a code of ethics at all and then when they finally did to adopt one that has no teeth. That’s one of the things you mentioned my weekly legal ethics roundup.

It’s one of the reasons why I was inspired to start writing this weekly newsletter headlines like these continuing to come out over and over again sometimes as if they were anew, and I felt like we really need to be paying attention to how often these kinds of things are coming up in the news and what that means, and importantly, what does it mean when journalists are increasingly the ones who are enforcing the ethics of, in this case, the Supreme Court, but also lawyers not to knock the journalism, and we need, clearly, we need excellent journalism bringing these issues to the surface because the profession and the judiciary has not sufficiently policed itself on ethics issues.

Jackie Gardina:

One of the questions that has come up and just to follow up on this conversation is who has the authority to enforce a code against the Supreme Court? And that tends to be controversial even though for many people it’s like, well, what do you mean there’s free floating unelected officials who have zero oversight, but is it your position that Congress does have the authority to issue ethics as well as to enforce them?

Renee Jefferson:

So there’s an important separation of powers question here to be sure, but the reality is Congress, well, especially for the lower courts, but also for the Supreme Court over time has been able to promulgate legislation that goes to how the court operates. It would not be enforceable if Congress passed a law and the President signed it into action that required the Supreme Court to decide a case in a particular way that would be a problem. But Congress can and has passed laws related to the court’s budget related to the size of the court. There are lots of terrific reforms that are out there. The difficulty really isn’t whether or not Congress has the constitutional authority to pass laws that would engage in ethics reform for the court. It’s whether Congress has the political wherewithal to do it right now, this is just not a Congress that has the ability to come together on this issue, although from time to time they do.

Three years ago now, I testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee about financial disclosures because the federal judiciary was not complying as they should be and we’re not following the same standards that members of Congress have to, and so there Congress did take action, so sometimes they can, but on the bigger issues related to Supreme Court ethics, I don’t see there being traction at this point in time for that to be a path forward, not because it would be unconstitutional or outside Congress’s scope of authority, but because we just don’t have a sufficient number of members of Congress who would be willing to vote for

Jackie Gardina:

It. There’s many bills that fall into that category. Sadly,

Mitch Winick:

We are going to take another brief break and when we come back we are going to continue our conversation with Professor Renee Jefferson, author of Law democratized a blueprint for solving the justice crisis.

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Jackie Gardina:

Another ethics question for you because it’s something that is in the air and especially for law schools, which is the concern about plagiarism, especially with chat GPT and other AI assisted writings. I suspect that you agree with us that plagiarism is a form of both theft and dishonesty, and recently the question of plagiarism became an area of focus in the challenge against Harvard University President Claudine Gay. I saw a lot of talk about Justice Neil Gorsuch and the plagiarism that was raised during his confirmation hearings and it resurfaced in the news with all the other plagiarism arguments going around. For a lot of non-academics, it might be a much a do about nothing, but as an ethics expert, what are your thoughts on gorsuch’s plagiarism issues?

Renee Jefferson:

On the one hand, there’s a lot of copycatting that goes on, especially within law firms, and in fact, what I thought you were going to ask me about, I don’t know, there’s a recent lawsuit where one law firm is suing another over having literally taken its entire brief and filed it as if it was its own taking credit for it. So on the one hand, that’s an extreme example, but on the one hand, in the legal profession, there’s a fair amount of copycatting that occurs, especially when lawyers are preparing motions and briefs and even the style for judicial opinions and especially if you’re repeating the sort of standard of review and that kind of thing. It’s an interesting question within the legal profession. That said, as an academic, think about my own students, they’re all held to a code of conduct at the University of Houston that they have to adhere to.

They cannot plagiarize. It’s very specific what plagiarism is basically lifting verbatim someone else’s words and not giving them credit for it. Is it problematic ethically? Yes. Should it be addressed? Yes. Is it problematic when it’s not? Yes, all of those things. I think the difference in treatment between a Supreme Court justice versus a university president goes more to a function of the Supreme Court Justice’s lifetime appointment once it’s secured. Right, but you raised the interesting point that this didn’t just come up with respect to Justice Gorsuch. Now one’s already on the bench, but it came up when he was being vetted, and I think that also is an example of politics coming into play because at the end of the day, even with those allegations revealed, it wasn’t enough to undermine the vote to confirm him. I don’t think that’s because, and I haven’t studied carefully, I haven’t looked, but I have read what others have reported. There are portions of other people’s work that show up in his that aren’t properly cited just because he has been confirmed as a justice. If that’s true, it doesn’t make it right. That is a function of a somewhat flawed and imperfect system at times.

Jackie Gardina:

Well, and I think you raise a really good point about the discipline, specifically the law because you’re right, there’s a lot of cutting and pasting and templates and other thing in the law, and one of the things we don’t talk to students about is the number of ways in which that’s a norm in the legal profession and when it’s okay and when it’s not. They might write an entire brief and it’s all their work, but a senior partner might add their name to the brief having not written any of it, thinking about Justice Gorsuch when he was on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, lots of clerks write the first draft of an opinion and then are never heard from again in terms of that work being acknowledged as theirs in the legal profession. It is confusing, I think for students to have this very high standard imposed upon them and then to have the practice of law really have a very different approach to it.

Renee Jefferson:

It’s unfortunate. I think anecdotally there is, at least with respect to the poor junior associate who slaves over a brief only to have the senior partner’s name but stamped on it at the end. When I was an associate back in the late 1990s, early two thousands, I felt like it was the most sincere form of flatter to have my entire memo lifted verbatim even though I got no credit, I knew. I think that increasingly now there has been a shift and I would advocate for a shift of recognizing the work that went into something like that, even if it means there are extra names at the end of a brief. I think that’s really important and it really goes to the pedagogical approach, how we prepare the next generation of lawyers. It seems pretty silly if we are going to hold them to super high standards with respect to plagiarism when they’re in law school, but then expect them to go and spend hours and hours of their lives writing up legal pleadings and to not find their name on them and getting the credit they deserve.

Mitch Winick:

Renee, while we have you on, if you don’t mind, we’d like to shift topics for a moment and go back to a previous book you wrote Shortlisted Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court. As you may know, we had Lisa Kloppenburg, one of our California colleagues on the show, and she talked about her book. The Best beloved thing is Justice Judge Dorothy Wright Nelson, who was considered on the Supreme Court shortlist at one point. We talked on that episode about how that might have dramatically changed the arc of the court, as would have many of the other women that you highlighted in your book. Talk to us a little about that. I think it’s a topic that just gets overlooked too often.

Renee Jefferson:

Well, and that’s the whole reason why we wrote the book. I think most people know even if you’re not a lawyer or part of the profession, most of the country knows the incredible story of Sandra Day O’Connor as our first female Supreme Court justice, but what most people, most lawyers even don’t know is that before her, there were at least nine other women who were officially shortlisted by presidents going all the way back to the 1930s. If you can imagine. The first was a woman in Florence Allen. She was shortlisted by FDR in 1937. When I’m just thinking and reflecting on that research, I often wonder, I don’t just marvel at her story, but I often wonder what would the legal profession look like indeed? What would professional life across the country look like if a woman had been in such a prominent role as a sitting Supreme Court justice in the late 1930s?

Sadly, we will never know, but she was an extraordinary woman. FDR actually put her on the Sixth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in 1934, the first woman to ever serve on a federal court of appeals, and how she got there I think is just such an inspiring story. She was the first woman elected to the Supreme Court of Ohio, and before she got there, she had been very active in the movement for women’s suffrage. She went all around Ohio campaigning so that women would have the right to vote secured, and once they did, she turned around and asked women for their vote and they delivered her to the Ohio Supreme Court, and so she was the first woman that we uncovered in our research to be shortlisted, and interestingly enough, our study discovered nine enough to fill an entire court even before O’Connor joined the bench, which both goes to how important it is to uncover these untold stories because each of these women, even though they didn’t make it to the US Supreme Court had incredibly successful legal careers to even be considered for that role.

It also really goes to undermine this myth or this narrative that the reason why we don’t see women in equal numbers in leadership is because it’s just a matter of time. They haven’t been in the pipeline long enough. The reality is there were lots of qualified women going back decades and decades and decades ago, and so part of what the shortlisted book does is tell the stories of these women and then the second half looks at examples from their lives to help us think about how to continue to remedy and address systemic barriers that hold women back from leadership roles.

Mitch Winick:

You talk about the pipeline and how long it takes. One of our recent episodes has Juve Khan, who’s the founder of the Appellate Project, and what she talked about is a similar theme, which is the pipeline of appellate lawyers who then would be eligible to be appellate justices or judges and the lack of anything other than predominantly white males in that whole pipeline. She’s working right now as a young lawyer with her group, the Appellate Project, to increase that pipeline and increase awareness of why it’s important to have a diversity of lived experience in the appellate process. I would assume that this follows just beautifully on your work with women in the justice system.

Renee Jefferson:

That’s absolutely the kind of reform that’s needed, but I would go one step further and say, not only do we need more diversity within what has become in recent decades, a very predictable path to the Supreme Court, which is largely having an appellate career before you do that, but we should look back at the history of who has sat on the US Supreme Court. Now, of course, if our measure is just race and gender, you find a lot of white men on the Supreme Court, but if you’re measuring diversity in other ways, you would find that in a few instances, members of the Supreme Court weren’t even lawyers didn’t have judicial experience, you would find greater geographic diversity. You would find that they maybe had served not in traditional appellate work, but had a practice dealing more with real problems that face real people in real life, and so I think that we need the pipeline itself to not just have traditional pipelines look more diverse, but really open up the range of who is considered qualified for a role. That’s really true for leadership roles across the legal profession and across all professions.

Jackie Gardina:

I’m going to give you a magic wand. You can only use it for one thing. In your book, you identify a number of both legislative and regulatory changes that you think need to happen in order to move us towards solving the justice crisis. You get to make one change. What’s your priority?

Renee Jefferson:

If I only get one, there are a lot that I could give you a top 10 list. I could give you a top five, but if I only can have one, it would have to be full funding for the Legal Services Corporation and for our listeners who aren’t familiar with what the LSC does, that’s really the backbone of every legal aid office in the country and they do tremendous work, and then by full funding, I mean go back to the levels it was funded decades ago, count for inflation and then also talk to the LSC about what they could do even beyond if they had the financial support that they need. For a lot of the reforms that I advocate in the book there is that reality tied to they’re going to cost money or they’re going to require fundamental restructuring of how things are done, and that’s part of why the book offers a blueprint because there’s not one magic solution. We have a Congress that’s not likely to impose mandatory ethics on the Supreme Court for lots of reasons. We also have a Congress that’s not likely to fully fund the Legal Services corporation and the way it needs to be funded. Now, my book really focuses not on that work, but on the legal needs for people who don’t qualify for Legal Aid but can’t afford a lawyer at six figures or more an hour for multiple hours, and so if you’d let me have a magic wand for two, I’m a lawyer, right?

Jackie Gardina:

Okay. Just

Renee Jefferson:

This time, if I got to have a second piece, it would have to be under the umbrella of widespread public education for individuals to understand how our legal system works to recognize when they have a legal problem that they could either use self-help tools to solve or seek out a lawyer and understand how to interact with that lawyer to understand what it should cost and to remove that mystery. My magic wand would make understanding law and the legal system much less opaque, much more easy to access user-friendly and widely utilized by the public.

Jackie Gardina:

That’s great, Renee, and I think we’re going to leave it there because that was a perfect way for us to end with you highlighting two priorities that you had, and I’m sorry that I can’t give you a magic wand.

Renee Jefferson:

Sorry. It It’s all right. It was fun to think about.

Mitch Winick:

Renee, thank you for joining us today. Also, thank you for the work you do, not just in your books and in your speaking and in your writing, but just even in your weekly newsletter in which you keep us aware, those of us who are interested in it but can’t always follow a nationwide spectrum of legal ethics issues. Thank you so much for the work you do to keep us all on top of that.

Renee Jefferson:

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Jackie Gardina:

Mitch. When we invited Renee onto the podcast, I knew that she had a new book coming out and I was really excited about its topic, which is about access to justice. I know you and I both feel very passionate about, I wasn’t prepared or I didn’t realize the breadth of her knowledge, ethics, free speech, access to justice, democracy, and we really were able to cover all of those things in this podcast, and I hope what we’re seeing at the start of our second season of SideBar is that we’re going to be able to continue to touch on all those issues as we progress through this second season.

Mitch Winick:

I absolutely agree. I’m in love with her book, and it’s not just because she’s so articulate and intelligent about these topics, but we share so much history on these topics. I also taught legal ethics, legal, professionalism, law practice management, technology and the law, but of course, when I was teaching technology and the law, it was still dial up and not dealing with AI and chat GPT and the challenges. Now, I am thrilled to see another one of our professional colleagues pick up the torch on so many of these issues and move them forward.

Jackie Gardina:

I gave her the magic wand at the end. She had so many things to choose from, so I understand why she was struggling. One of the things that I want to raise for our listeners is something perhaps a lot of people don’t realize or think about. We’re so used to the idea that if you are arrested or in some kind of criminal trouble, you can get an attorney even if you can’t afford one, and we set up an entire system to make sure that happens. Now, I can’t say it’s well-funded system, but it’s available. We don’t have the same for someone who might be in civil trouble, think about someone who has huge debt, someone who’s coming after them, a debt collector, and perhaps doing so violating the law. There’s this case in the Supreme Court called Gideon v Wainwright, which created the right to an attorney, and some people have argued we should have a civil Gideon, that everyone deserves access to an attorney regardless of whether or not they have the money or can afford him. I think linking it to not just our system of justice, but to our democracy makes the argument even stronger for civil Gideon,

Mitch Winick:

And let me also say that I’m pleased that we’re kicking off season two with an emphasis on legal ethics and the integrity of the profession because as Professor Jefferson talked about, if we don’t enforce integrity of our profession, it really does undermine the foundation of what we talk about as access to justice. The lawyers involved on either side of the case or in the judiciary have to step up and have the highest level of integrity if the system is going to work.

Jackie Gardina:

Once again, I want to thank everyone who joined us today on SideBar and as always Mitch, and I would love to know what’s on your mind. You can reach us at SideBar media.org.

Mitch Winick:

SideBar would not be possible without our producer, David Eakin, who also composes and performs all of the SideBar music. Thank you also to Gogo Zoger who manages sidebars marketing and social media.

Jackie Gardina:

Colleges of law and Monterey College of Law are part of a larger organization called California Accredited Law Schools. All of our schools are dedicated to providing access and opportunity to a legal education to marginalized communities.

Mitch Winick:

For more information about the California accredited Law schools, go to ca law schools.org. That’s ca law schools.org.

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